SEPTEMBER HIGHLIGHTS 2026

SEPTEMBER HIGHLIGHTS

MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART - Evening Sale

Mid-Century Modern Live: Furniture, Design and Jewellery

Tuesday 15 September 7pm Live Virtual Auction

18 August to Wednesday 16 September, closing from 7pm Timed Online Auction

MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART - Day Sale

MID-CENTURY MODERN ELEMENTS: Glass, Ceramics, Silver, Steel and Jewellery

20 August to Tuesday 15 September, closing from 2pm Timed Online Auction

18 August to Wednesday 16 September, closing from 10am Timed Online Auction

Mid-Century Modern Styling: Furniture & Interiors 18 August to Wednesday 16 September, closing from 2pm Timed Online Auction Cover: Lot 129 Irma Stern, Dahlias.

Top: Lot 143 Maggie Laubser, Portrait of a Woman with Headscarf Holding Flowers

www.straussart.co.za

EVENING SALE: MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART 19 August - 15 September 202 Live Virtual Auction

123 † Irma Stern Cape Town Docks 1957

signed and dated; inscribed with the artist’s name, the title, medium and numbered ‘cat.

61’ On a Grosvenor Gallery label adhered to the reverse and further inscribed with the artist’s name and exhibition details on a Grosvenor Gallery label adhered to the reverse; inscribed with the artist’s name, the title and medium on a Fabian Fine Art label adhered to the reverse; inscribed ‘street’ and further indistinctly inscribed and numbered ‘cat 61’ on the reverse; numbered 155 on a label adhered to the reverse. oil on canvas 50 by 62cm R 2 000 000 - 3 000 000 VIEW LOT

PROVENANCE

Fabian Fine Art, Cape Town.

Private Collection.

EXHIBITED

Grosvenor Gallery, London, Irma Stern Memorial Exhibition, 14 March to 15 April 1967, cat. no. 61.

LITERATURE

Neville Dubow (1974) Irma Stern, Cape Town: C Struik Publishers, illustrated in colour on the cover.

Marion Arnold (1995) Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye, Cape Town: Fernwood Press, illustrated in colour on page 87.

Although best known for her portraits and still lifes, Irma Stern was a prolific painter who also consistently worked in the genres of landscape and the nude.

Her marine paintings, in which themes of landscape and labour frequently converge, form a substantial yet comparatively overlooked aspect of her output. Throughout her career she

(fig 1) Neville Dubow (1991) Paradise: The Journal and Letters (1917–1993) of Irma Stern, Cape Town: Chameleon Press, pages 51-52.

repeatedly returned to harbours, beaches and coastal settlements, depicting both the rhythms of maritime work and

the changing character of life along Atlantic and Mediterranean shorelines.

Biography offers one explanation for this enduring interest. From childhood, Stern crossed regularly between South Africa and Europe by sea, and harbours became recurring points of arrival and departure in her life. One of the final images reproduced in her private journal, covering the years 1919 to 1924 and published posthumously in 1991, depicts Cape Town seen from Table Bay in gradations of black, accompanied by the evocative German caption: “And the sea roared through my dreams.”1(fig 1) Stern’s early sketchbooks include numerous depictions of harbours, but a transformative three-month stay in Madeira in 1931 saw the subject assume a central place in her oil painting. The visit yielded a number of assured harbour scenes, notably an exceptional colourist work depicting three anonymous figures flanked by vividly decorated wooden fishing boats (fig 2). Acquired by the collectors Anton and Huberte Rupert, it was later lent to the 1967 memorial exhibition of Stern’s work in London, where the present lot was also exhibited.2 Following her first visit to Zanzibar in 1939, Stern produced a steady stream of gouaches and oils depicting harbours at Alicante, Istanbul and Venice, as well as scenes descriptive of Cape Town and

nearby fishing communities such as Kalk Bay (fig 3). Painted in 1957, Cape Town Docks belongs to the final phase of Stern’s career, when her handling of oil paint became increasingly fluid and calligraphic. Two figures walk along the quayside beside a line of boldly painted fishing boats; their presence integrated into a composition that privileges painterly license and atmosphere over topographical precision.

working-class communities whose lives were shaped by the soil and the sea, remarked: “Stern is at her best when the theme of her subjects is basic and powerful enough to match her own temperament – themes of harvest of the earth and the sea; themes where the abundance of nature can be measured by that of the artist.”3

(fig 3) Fishing Boats, Kalk Bay (1931) and Harbour Scene, Kalk Bay (1956) illustrated in Marion Arnold (1995) Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye, Cape Town: Fernwood Press, page 57.

(fig 2) Fishing Boats, Madeira (1931) oil on canvas, image courtesy of the Rupert Art Foundation Collection, Rupert Museum, Stellenbosch.

Like many of Stern’s harbour scenes after her stay in Madeira, this work functions both as a record of place and as an understated meditation on maritime labour. Neville Dubow, writing in 1959 about Stern’s lifelong engagement with

1. Neville Dubow (1991) Paradise: The Journal and Letters (1917–1993) of Irma Stern, Cape Town: Chameleon Press, pages 65 and 72.

2. Grosvenor Gallery, London, Irma Stern Memorial Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, 14 March to 15 April 1967, page 7.

3. Neville Dubow (1959) ‘Irma Stern Shows Her Abundant Art’, Cape Argus, 20 February.

Based on historical research and physical evidence, the present lot is believed to very likely depict the historic Alfred Basin at Table Bay Harbour, presently known as the V & A Waterfront. The composition captures the traditional quayside posts, commercial fishing boats, and the characteristic background silhouette of Signal Hill, aligning closely with the maritime architecture of Cape Town’s port.

Images: National Library of South Africa, Cape Town.

129 Irma Stern Dahlias 1935

signed and dated oil on canvas 96 by 83cm R 8 000 000 - 10 000 000 VIEW LOT

PROVENANCE

Acquired from the artist, 20 May 1935.

Private Collection.

EXHIBITED

The Criterion, Johannesburg, 20 May to 1 June 1935, cat. no. 46.

Glen’s Gallery, Pretoria, June 1935, cat. no. 46.

LITERATURE

(1935) The Star, 20 May, illustrated in black and white on page 7.

(1936) The South African Lady’s Pictoral, March, illustrated in black and white, unpaginated.

Flower paintings occupy a central place in Irma Stern’s prodigious output. While flowers appeared in her earliest drawings and watercolours, and often formed part of her controversial figure paintings of the 1920s, it was only after she settled at The Firs, her home in Rosebank, Cape Town, in 1927 that they truly emerged as independent subjects capable of sustaining her ambitions as a painter. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, Stern coupled this enthusiasm for floral subjects with increasingly bold experimentation in colour.

against the distinctive yellow wall of her studio, their mauve, pink, orange and red petals animated by generous impasto and assertive brushwork.

The composition reveals an artist increasingly interested in the expressive possibilities of colour rather than merely its descriptive function. It marks an important transition in Stern’s mature style. During the 1930s, she gradually abandoned the hard-edged Expressionist manner associated with her early work in favour of a more personal idiom in which colour, applied with brush and palette knife, became the organising principle of the composition.

In Dahlias, line yields to chromatic relationships. The lustrous copper pot, the turquoise tablecloth and the richly varied

The present lot is illustrated as hanging in the artist’s sitting-room in The South African Lady’s Pictoral, March 1936.

Dahlias (1935) represents the culmination of this sustained process of innovation.

Stern repeatedly returned to the same luxuriant blooms – particularly lilies, magnolias, hydrangeas and dahlias – their visual profusion, rather than any symbolic significance, marking them out for repeated depiction. Here, arranged in a copper pot and flanked by bowls of fruit, the abundant dahlia blooms are set

Magnolias and Fruit (1947) Strauss & Co, Cape Town, 21 October 2013, lot 701, Sold R 9 662 800.00 (USD 597139.65).

blooms are unified by what her biographer Bernard Sachs memorably described as Stern’s “sonorous colour harmonies

and daring contrasts”,1 and evidence what the critic, Melvin Simmers characterised as her “daring use of richly dangerous colour harmonies”.2 The result is a still life of remarkable vitality that remains faithful to observed nature while asserting the modernist autonomy of paint itself.

The significance of this development was recognised by critics and patrons.

Dahlias was exhibited at the Criterion Restaurant Ballroom in Johannesburg in May 1935, where it was among the most highly priced works in the exhibition and sold on the opening day. It travelled the following month to Glen’s Gallery in Pretoria, where a reviewer singled out Stern’s flower paintings as “beautiful pieces of work, full of depth, of light and shade and of gracious loveliness”, adding that “the gladioli, the magnolias and the dahlias are exquisite”.3 The acclaim heaped on Stern’s flower paintings was not confined to South Africa. While exhibiting in London in 1937, Stern met the sculptor Jacob Epstein, who remarked: “Do you know that nobody

living can paint flowers better than you do – that the Renoir roses I just saw look like paper against your flowers.”4 That reputation has endured. Stern’s monumental dahlia paintings of the 1940s remain among the most sought-

Detail, Still Life with Fruit and Dahlias (1946) Strauss & Co, Johanneburg, 20 May 2019, lot 233, Sold R16 159 600 (USD 999679.09).

after works in her oeuvre, achieving some of the highest prices realised for any of her still lifes at auction. The present work stands at the beginning of this remarkable sequence of dahlia paintings that extends to works produced into the 1960s.

1. Joseph Sachs (1942) Irma Stern and the Spirit of Africa, Pretoria: J L van Schaik, page 36.

2. Melvin Simmers (1938) ‘South Africa’s most vital painter, the art of Irma Stern’, The Cape Times, 28 March.

3. (1935) ‘Art Exhibition in Pretoria: Arresting Studies by Irma Stern’, The Star, 12 June, page 8.

4. Mona Berman (2003) Remembering Irma, Cape Town: Double Storey Books, page 52.

142 Wolf Kibel Young Boy oil on canvas

26 by 20,5cm R 200 000 - 300 000 VIEW LOT

Painted during the brief but extraordinarily productive decade between Kibel’s arrival in Cape Town in 1929 and his premature death in 1938, Young Boy embodies the artist’s singular contribution to the development of South African modernism.

Kibel belonged to a generation of Jewish émigré artists who transformed local painting in the 1930s, synthesising the expressive distortions of European modernism into an intensely personal visual language characterised by emotional introspection and painterly immediacy.

His art, as Esmé Berman observed, is distinguished by its “exaggerated colour contrasts and expressionistic distortions”, qualities that are powerfully evident in this compelling portrait study.

The young sitter emerges from an indeterminate ground of smoky greys and muted violets, his elongated features modelled through a dense accumulation of ochres, burnt oranges and deep shadows. Kibel’s brushwork is restless and tactile, oscillating between description and dissolution. Rather than pursuing naturalistic likeness, the artist constructs a psychological presence through fractured planes of colour and deliberately unstable contours. The figure’s downcast gaze and inward posture evoke an acute sense of solitude, transforming what might otherwise be a conventional portrait into an exploration of emotional interiority.

Portraiture formed a significant and recurring aspect of Kibel’s oeuvre, yet his studies of children remain among his most affecting achievements (fig 1, 2 and 3). They reveal the influence of European Expressionism, particularly the work of Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943), whose portraits of anonymous youths similarly privileged psychological intensity over social identity. Unlike Soutine, however, Kibel strips away almost all narrative reference. The sitter is presented neither as an individual of social standing nor as a participant in any recognisable world. Instead, the child becomes a vehicle through which

Kibel explores states of contemplation, vulnerability and emotional fragility. The boundaries between figure and space begin to dissolve, as the body seems to recede into the pictorial surface itself, suggesting a consciousness turned inward and detached from the external world.

(fig 1) Portrait of the Artist’s Son Joseph with a Hat, Strauss & Co, Cape Town, 16 March 2015, lot 561, Sold R 2 955 680 (USD 186 209), with the title

(fig 2) Boy with Green Waistcoat, Illustrated in Freda Kibel and Neville Dubow (1968) Wolf Kibel, Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, page 27, plate VII.

Recent scholarship has identified within Kibel’s art a persistent atmosphere of melancholy and introspection, qualities that distinguish his work from the more outward looking modernism of his contemporary and friend, Lippy Lipshitz. Where Lipshitz conceived of the body as a site of vitality and physical affirmation, Kibel understood it as a repository of inner experience, a means through which the complexities of memory, solitude and psychological

(fig 3) Boy with Pink Jersey (1935) Rupert Art Foundation, Stellenbosch, illustrated in Jay van den Berg (curator) (2025) Wolf Kibel and Lippy Lipshitz, Palm Studios, exhibition catalogue, Cape Town: Hoberman and South African Jewish Museum, page 103, plate 11.

reflection could be articulated. In his portraits, the human figure becomes less an assertion of physical presence than an embodiment of consciousness itself,

poised between material existence and emotional withdrawal.

The material surface of Young Boy is central to its expressive force. Thick passages of paint, areas of abrasion and the visible texture of the unstretched canvas lend the work an unfinished vitality, emphasising the artist’s engagement with the act of painting itself. Equally important is the way in which Kibel draws the viewer into the emotional world of the sitter. The unstable contours and shifting planes of colour create a sense of intimacy and identification, enveloping the spectator within the psychological atmosphere of the work rather than merely presenting an image for detached observation.

The major 2025 retrospective Palm Studios: Wolf Kibel and Lippy Lipshitz at the South African Jewish Museum, alongside a growing body of scholarship, has restored Kibel to a central position within South African art history, underscoring the singularity of his contribution to twentieth century modernism and reaffirming the enduring relevance of his psychologically charged vision. In this respect, Young Boy transcends mere representation, standing instead as a poignant meditation on childhood, memory and the fragile emotional condition that lies at the heart of Kibel’s art.

Jay van den Berg, Associate Curator of the South African Jewish Museum.

143 Maggie Laubser Portrait of a Woman with Headscarf Holding Flowers oil on canvas signed with the artist’s initials laid down on board

50 by 39,5cm R700 000 - 1 000 000

VIEW LOT

PROVENANCE

Dr T E W Schumann, Pretoria, acquired through Professor M L du Toit, c. 1933.

Mrs Elita de Klerk.

LITERATURE

Dalene Marais (1994) Maggie Laubser: Her Paintings, Drawings and Graphics, Johannesburg and Cape Town: Perskor Publishers, illustrated in black and white on page 212, cat. no. 693.

Maggie Laubser was part of a small vanguard of European-trained painters who modernised South African art in the 1920s and 1930s. Like her contemporaries, Wolf Kibel and Irma Stern, her bold Expressionist style, which placed colour at the centre of her practice, was heavily criticised and sales were initially poor. Yet even at this formative stage of her career, Laubser enjoyed considerable critical and institutional support, a history recorded in the provenance of this exceptional portrait of a young woman wearing a yellow headscarf.

The work was originally acquired in a sale brokered by Martin L du Toit, founder and editor of the literary journal Die Nuwe Brandwag (The New Sentinel, 1929–33) and inaugural head of the Department of Cultural History and Art at the University of Pretoria. Du Toit was an active champion of Expressionism in the Transvaal, introducing audiences to Laubser and Stern, among others.

Laubser met Du Toit in 1929, a transformative year in which the Union government acquired several of her works for its embassies in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and the

Netherlands.1 Du Toit organised Laubser’s first exhibition in the Transvaal in 1931, at Macfadyen Memorial Hall, University of Pretoria, followed by another at the same venue in 1933.

In Dalene Marais’s catalogue raisonné, this undated work appears in a grouping that predates 1932. Whatever its precise date, by the time Laubser was introduced to Transvaal audiences, her sensitive portraits of working women from the Cape’s farms had become an important part of her output. Esmé Berman describes her many portraits of the late 1920s and early 1930s as “strong, positive portrayals” marked by “her sympathetic awareness of the human being behind the features”.2 This portrait is emblematic. The almond-eyed sitter, dressed in traditional farm clothing, is shown seated indoors, indicated by the back of a chair at right.

Her presence is most immediately registered by the blazing yellow of her headscarf, yet it is Laubser’s attention to her face – particularly the cheekbones, nose and jewel-coloured lips – that ultimately directs the eye. Berman notes

The present lot holds a unique place in recent history, having hung prominently in the background of F W de Klerk’s final address. Released posthumously following his death in Cape Town at the age of 85, this pre-recorded video captured the former president against the backdrop of this work, underscoring his significant and debated history in South African society.

VIEW THE VIDEO FEATURING THIS LOT IN THE BACKGROUND HERE.

that Laubser produced her portraits “without the model in view, drawing on her memory and insight in order to interpret more than mere physical appearance”.3

melancholic, arguing that the leitmotif of paintings by Afrikaner artists such as Laubser was “essentially tragic”, characterised by “inherent pessimism and melancholia”.6

This aspect of her painting, its rootedness in the imagination as much as reality, formed the basis of an evocative passage in Johannes Meintjes’s 1944 monograph on Laubser: “To her, everything is a wealth of colour and design. This unassuming, solitary woman does not merely paint pictures; she lives them.

They are created after prolonged study and countless sketches – repeated over and over until she truly knows her subject – and only then does she paint, away from the subject itself and from other people. Drawing upon her knowledge, intuition, and rich imagination – sometimes even a playful wit, yet always with deep empathy – she creates something that comes from within” (original in Afrikaans).4

That Laubser resonated with Afrkaans-speaking audiences is well documented, both in the provenance of this work and beyond. This painting appeared as a backdrop in former president F W de Klerk’s posthumous video apology of 11 November 2021, in which he apologised without qualification for the pain, hurt, indignity and damage caused by apartheid. The appeal of Laubser’s portraits of farm folk and fishermen – natuurmense, as Meintjes put it 7 – is also evident in the recollections of the writer Hennie Aucamp.

Both Berman and Du Toit, who had planned to write a monograph on the artist before his untimely death in 1938, identified a note of melancholy in Laubser’s work. Berman suggested that her paintings were “as much a portrait of the artist as of the individual sitter”.5 Du Toit ventured a bolder cultural interpretation.

Writing under an alias in Ons Vaderland, he identified the essential character of Afrikaner art as sober, reflective and

Writing in 2002 in an appreciation of opera singer Mimi Coertse, whose art collection while based in Vienna 8 included a Laubser, Aucamp recalled how, with money earned by his mother from the sale of eggs and cream, he acquired a Laubser painting of an old woman wearing a headscarf. 8 He observed that the affectionate Afrikaans expressions “Onse Maggie” and “Onse Mimi” could, despite their apparent affection and intimacy, also carry a patronising undertone. 9 The possibility of such cultural identification and debate owes much to Du Toit’s early enthusiasm for, and promotion of, Laubser.

1. Dalene Marais (1994) Maggie Laubser: Her Paintings, Drawings and Graphics, Cape Town: Perskor, page 7.

2. Esmé Berman (1970) Art and Artists of South Africa, Cape Town: A A Balkema, page 175.

3. Ibid., page 175.

4. Johannes Meintjes (1944) Maggie Laubser, Cape Town: H A U M Jacques Dusseau & Co, page 16.

5. Berman, op.cit. page 175.

6. Quoted in Jeanne van Eeden (2008) ‘Collecting South African Art in the 1930s: The Role of Martin du Toit’, Historia 53.1, May. Page 167 7. Meintjes, op.cit. page 16.

8. Mimi Coertse (2007) ‘n Stem vir Suid-Afrika: My storie, soos vertel aan Ian Raper, Somerset West, Litera Publikasies, page 136.

9. Hennie Aucamp (2002) ‘Hoekom het jy teruggekom, Mimi?’, in Johan van Rooyen (ed) Mimi: ‘n Feesbundel, Pretoria: Protea Boekhuis, pages 23 – 25.

144 Irma Stern Cape Malay Woman with a Head Scarf 1933 signed and dated 1933; numbered 43, 105 and inscribed ‘Dr. M L du Toit’ on the reverse of the sheet gouache on paper.

47,5 by 37,5cm R 1 500 000 - 2 000 000

VIEW LOT

PROVENANCE Acquired from the artist by Dr Martin L du Toit, 1933.

Acquired from Dr Martin L du Toit by the previous owner, circa 1952, thence by descent.

The Property of an Important Collector.

Offered at market for the very first time, Cape Malay Woman with a Head Scarf is a vibrant gouache that arrives directly from a private family collection where it has remained treasured for seventy-four years.

Irma Stern worked with gouache throughout her career, both in the studio and on her extensive travels.

Its immediacy and portability made it ideally suited to recording people and places with remarkable economy, while its opaque, matte surface allowed for a richness of colour distinct from oil paint. This intimate portrait of a young woman set against a variegated blue

(fig 1) Madeira Portrait (1931) Strauss & Co, Cape Town, 10 August 2021, lot 282, Sold R 432 440.00 (USD 26 742).

ground demonstrates Stern’s assured command of the medium, balancing fluid draughtsmanship with passages of saturated colour.

Starting in the late 1920s, Stern became increasingly interested in colour theory, devoting herself to what she described as

“studying and building up a new palette”.1 This enquiry occupied her for several years. In June 1935, she delivered a lecture in Pretoria titled “The relativity of colour and form in art”.

Yellow, which had appeared only sparingly in her work of the 1920s, assumed growing importance as her palette became richer and more expansive.

The expressive possibilities of yellow had been transformed by an earlier generation of painters, notably Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) and Paul Gauguin (18481903), standard-bearers of autonomous colour with whom Stern felt a profound affinity. In a 1937 letter to her friend Freda Feldman, she wrote: “At present I feel I can do the same as the best here and that is to say the best living and strangely enough Gauguin and mostly van Gogh seem to me very much like a level I have also reached.”2 An early indication of this chromatic confidence appears in Madeira Portrait (1931) (fig 1), also handled by Strauss & Co, where yellow assumes a far more commanding role.

In the present work by contrast, its use is more restrained, anticipating the way Stern would later deploy the colour to energise compositions such as Malay (Black Headdress) (fig 2), 1946. Here, yellow animates the sitter’s blouse and lends warmth to the modelling of her heart-shaped face. It functions neither symbolically nor decoratively, but as a means of investing an anonymous sitter with vitality, warmth and quiet dignity.

The ordinariness of the subject – a working woman depicted in unremarkable dress and a simple white headscarf – is equally significant, signaling a move away from the high romanticism of her depictions of Black and Coloured women in the 1920s towards the dignity of everyday life. The shift did

not escape contemporary critics. Edward Roworth, one of Stern’s earliest antagonists in the Cape press, observed in 1934 that she had strayed from “the straight and narrow ‘Expressionist’ path into the more flowery fields of realism”.3 It was, however,

(fig 2) Malay (Black Headdress) (1946) Strauss & Co, Cape Town, 28 October 2025, lot 151, Sold R 21 731 250.00 (USD 1,336,282.81).

a qualified realism, one in which expressive colour – above all yellow – remained an irreducible fact.

A note on the original owner: Dr Martin L du Toit was a prominent academic and an early champion of expressionism in the

Transvaal. He founded and edited the literary journal Die Nuwe Brandwag (The New Sentinel, 1929–33, with cover designs

by J H Pierneef ), and became the inaugural head of the Department of Cultural History and Art at the University of Pretoria. In 1933, Du Toit – previously a colleague of Stern’s former husband, Dr Johannes Prinz, at the University of Cape Town – invited Stern to exhibit at Macfadyen Hall in Pretoria.4 It was her first exhibition in the administrative capital.

One newspaper characterised Stern as South Africa’s “wildest” painter5, but the critical reception was, on the whole, favourable, and the Pretoria Town Council acquired two paintings for its municipal collection. Stern returned to Pretoria in 1935 to exhibit at Glen’s Gallery. These activities preceded her participation in the art exhibition accompanying the Empire Exhibition of 1936, the large-scale festival held to mark Johannesburg’s golden jubilee. Du Toit served as chair and honorary curator of the art exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. An illustrated catalogue featured Stern’s Orange Pickers on its cover. The exhibition is now widely regarded as the “first significant demonstration of critical recognition” of expressionism and other emergent modernist styles in South African painting.6

1. Irma Stern (1933) The Irma Stern Trust Collection, Irma Stern’s™ early biography as written by her: SA Life and the Woman’s Forum December 7th 1933, online, accessed 7 August 2026.

2. Mona Berman (2003) Remembering Irma, Cape Town: Double Storey, page 53.

3. Edward Roworth (1934) ‘Notable Works of Art’, Cape Times, 22 December.

4. Jeanne van Eeden (1998) ‘Irma Stern’s First Exhibition in Pretoria, 1933’, South African Journal of Art History, No. 13, page 90.

5. Ibid, page 100.

6. Esmé Berman (1970) Art & Artists of South Africa, Cape Town: A A Balkema, page 67.

150 Gerard Sekoto

Man with a Stick 1976 signed and dated ‘76 gouache on paper

57 by 39cm R 150 000 - 200 000 VIEW LOT

PROVENANCE

Mr L J Falkson.

Aspire, Johannesburg, 28 October 2018, lot 2, with the title Man with Cane.

LITERATURE

Barbara Lindop, Gerard Sekoto, Bruce and Mark Attwood, Broedestroom Press, Johannesburg, 1988, page 284, illustrated in colour.

ITEM NOTES Gerard Sekoto’s artistic expression reflects the journey of his personal life. Man with a Stick (1976), a gouache on paper, draws on earlier experiences and influences, evoking deeply rooted memories of township life that stayed with him throughout his career.

His upbringing in Botshabelo, the German Mission station in rural Mpumalanga and later Limpopo was formative to both his visual and musical development. He later returned to Seshego, a township in Polokwane, where he taught at Seshego Primary School.

In Johannesburg, he lived in Sophiatown, a vibrant community shaped in part by the Church of Christ the King, where Father Trevor Huddleston served as rector and which appears prominently in what may have been the artist’s first oil painting. In 1942, he moved to District Six, in Cape Town, another lively community, before returning to reconnect with his family in Eastwood, on the outskirts of Pretoria. There, already recognised as an established and admired artist, he painted some of his most lyrical and moving depictions of his family and neighbours. The rolling hills of Eastwood recur often in his later “memory” landscapes.

By the time Sekoto went into self-imposed exile in 1947, never to return to South Africa, he was established in well-patronised galleries in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Pretoria, had achieved strong sales, and had been invited by Walter Battiss to join The New Group. Arriving in Paris in the winter of 1947, however, he lost confidence.

Unable to speak French, poor and alone, he struggled until a French art gallerist offered him an exhibition in rue des Beaux-Arts in 1949.

In Paris, he first painted his surroundings and local people, as he had in South Africa, but his work showed greater distance from his home country and less individual specificity. In the 1950s, he developed “series” paintings, repeating similar themes through variations in colour and composition. By the 1960s, as his life became more settled and his friendships and recognition grew, he produced more portraits and landscapes.

He also worked in a fashionable night café, playing piano, composing and singing his own lyrics; this musicality increasingly shaped his paintings. A visit to Senegal in the early 1960s gave his work new energy, later absorbed into the paintings of the 1970s.

Man with a Stick presents a tall, imposing suited man walking through a sun-filled street, his upright stance and walking stick lending the figure both physical presence and a quiet sense of dignity. The large figure dominates the open landscape, where flowing hills recall earlier Eastwood compositions and dwarf the small brick-and-tin houses. Unlike today’s overcrowded townships, this scene feels spacious and quiet. The scene is bathed in subdued hues of yellow, blues and greens applied in broken strokes, while the pale blue sky and sun-bleached pavement establish an atmosphere in which the viewer encounters an archetypal passer-by.

The figure’s obscured, anonymous face-blurred by shadow and light-is significant, creating a sense of anonymity and alienation brought about by a life lived in exile. Unlike pre-exile Eastwood works, where subjects were recognisable, this work filters observation and memory

while remaining deeply connected to an enduring preoccupation with the everyday human experience.

There is also a musical quality to the piece. The repeated verticals of the figure, cane, buildings and distant architectural elements establish a rhythm across the

composition, while the rapid, syncopated brushstrokes animate the surface. A lifelong engagement with musicparticularly jazz-has often been associated with this rhythmic approach to painting, in which colour and gesture seem to operate almost as musical notes.

Sekoto remains one of the pivotal figures in South African modernism. His paintings of everyday life, like the present lot, established an enduring visual record of ordinary lives while simultaneously developing a highly personal expressionist vocabulary.

Barbara Lindop, 2026

My present work is a little different from the earlier in technique and sometimes, also in colour. Although both periods still retain the endeavour to express the movement and the desire to search into the innermost feelings of my subjects.

Gerard Sekoto

153 Lisa Brice

Untitled 2005 signed with the artist’s initials and dated 05 oil on paper

31,5 by 24cm R 500 000 - 700 000

PROVENANCE

Private Collection, Johannesburg.

VIEW LOT

160 Erik Laubscher

Euphorbias 1956 signed and dated oil on paper

102 by 88cm R 1 500 000 - 2 000 000 VIEW LOT

PROVENANCE

The Artist’s Collection, 2009.

The Erik Laubscher Heritage Trust.

EXHIBITED

This work was exhibited in Cape Town in 1956. The exact details are not confirmed but it was substituted for the work that Laubscher had shown at the Venice Biennale.

South African National Gallery, Cape Town, Paris and South African Artists 18501965, 14 April to 29 May 1988, cat. no. 150.

Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, Paris and South African Artists 18501965, 22 June to17 July 1988, cat. no. 150.

Sasol Art Gallery, Stellenbosch, Erik Laubscher, 25 June to 31 July 1994, cat. no. 20.

Michael Stevenson and Deon Viljoen (2003) South African Art 1850 - 2003, Cape Town: Stevenson and Viljoen, cat. no. 12.

SMAC, Stellenbosch, Erik Laubscher: A Major Retrospective Exhibition, 5 December 2009 to 25 February 2010.

EBONY/CURATED, Bordeaux House, Franschhoek, Erik Laubscher: The Landscapes, A Selection Of Works From 1946 – 2012, 28 October 2017 to 7 January 2018.

EBONY/CURATED, Cape Town, Modern Masters VII, June to July 2025.

LITERATURE Lucy Alexander, Emma Bedford and Evelyn Cohen (1988) Paris and South African Artists 1850-1965, Cape Town: South African National Gallery, illustrated in colour on page 89.

Michael Stevenson and Deon Viljoen (2003) South African Art 1850 - 2003, Cape Town: Stevenson and Viljoen, illustrated in colour, unpaginated.

Hans Fransen (2009) Erik Laubscher: A Life in Art, Stellenbosch: SMAC, illustrated in colour on page 59.

Phillippa Duncan and Marc Stanes (curators) (2017) Erik Laubscher: The Land scapes, A Selection Of Works from 1946 – 2012, Cape Town: Ebony Curated, illus trated in colour on page 8.

In a 2005 catalogue accompanying an exhibition at Johans Borman Fine Art, Amanda Botha wrote on Erik Laubscher in context with Jacobus Kloppers and Walter Meyer. Botha said of the older artist that Laubscher’s experience is ‘located in the expanses of the South African landscape where it is possible, as it were, to breathe freely – [both] in his sensory perception of it and on the canvas’.

Upon his return to South Africa in 1951 from France, Laubscher became recognised for his bold use of luminous and resonant colour and his capacity to absorb the influence of contemporary masters without being influenced by their personal idiosyncrasies. His still life compositions (fig 1), which acknowledged the influence of Bernard Buffet, were

(fig 1) Still Life with Coffee Pot and Fruit (1952) Strauss & Co, Cape Town 3 March 2018,l lot 605

exhibited alongside the works of the more established New Group in Cape Town.

During a holiday to Bushman’s River Mouth in 1953 Laubscher began drawing the local Euphorbia forests. Deciding that pencil was unsuitable for the subject he

used a charcoal of his own manufacture, burning sticks in the evening fires (fig 2).

These drawings formed the basis for the body of work which signalled a departure from the eloquent but Eurocentric post-Paris still life (fig 3). It was also here that Laubscher made his first strides towards abstraction by filling

audience Euphorbias (1956) was substituted as the former had travelled to Geneva as part of a cultural exchange.

Indeed it was this that led Matthys Bokhurst to publish the news that South Africa had been invited to participate in the fourth Sao Paulo Biennale.

Euphorbias (1956) is a substantial composition characterised by strong flat planes of colour that defy the two-dimensionality of the painting surface. Laubscher’s use of black functions as both a descriptive line and a register through which the eye travels.

The euphorbias from which the title is

(fig 2) Study for Euphorbia (1954) charcoal on paper. .

in spaces between the foliage with flat planes of pure colour. By 1956 the young artist was married with two young children. His professional standing as an artist was cemented when he was invited to submit works for the 1956 Venice Biennale.

His work Landscape with Red Sky received favour among judges at the event and he was awarded a special mention. This meant however that when the collective Biennale works were exhibited to a Cape Town

(fig 3) Two Stick Figures (1955) Sasol Art Museum Collection, illustrated in Hans Franzen (2009) Erik Laubscher: A Life in Art, Stellenbosch: SMAC, page 63.

derived appear sinuous and humanoid.

Given Laubscher’s deepening friendship with Jan Rabie, this writer argues that the work can be experienced as a metaphor for the existential path that the young artist had embarked upon. As an artist he was constantly challenging himself creatively while also assuming the roles of husband and father.

Hans Franzen (2009) Erik Laubscher: A Life in Art, Stellenbosch: SMAC. Erik Laubscher. The artist’s own unpublished press clipping books (Vol I 1946-1979).

No Author (no date) Johans Borman Biography, online, accessed July 2017.

DAY SALE: MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART 19 August - 15 September 202 Online Auction

8 Tom Cullberg

Happy New Year House 2006 oil on canvas

170 by 120cm R 20 000 - 30 000 VIEW LOT

44 Asemahle Ntlonti

Untitled 2023 paint, paper, acrylic gel medium and polypropethane thread on canvas

143 by 97 by 2,5cm R 80 000 - 120 000 VIEW LOT

47 Pierre Vermeulen

Untitled 2021 signed and dated on the reverse gold leaf imitate, sweat, acrylic and shellac on linen

50 by 40 by 2,5cm R 30 000 - 50 000 VIEW LOT

77 Boemo Diale

Awaiting an Embrace from Above 2024 signed and dated ‘24 on the reverse mixed media on canvas, in the artist’s handmade Zambia frame

110 by 80cm R 60 000 - 80 000 VIEW LOT

81 Ruby Swinney

Moon Country 2023 signed and dated ‘23 on a label adhered to the reverse. oil on silk

55 by 30 by 5cm R 30 000 - 50 000 VIEW LOT

MID-CENTURY MODERN ELEMENTS: GLASS, CERAMICS, SILVER, STEEL & JEWELLERY 18 August - 16 September 2026 Timed Online Auction

223 Lars Hellsten Swedish 1933-2022 ’Corona’ crystal bowl for Orrefors, designed 1987 moulded clear crystal glass

Height: 10,5cm; Diameter: 8,5cm R 800 - 1 000

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224 Lalique French 1945 - Present Lalique ‘Tête de Paon’ frosted and blue-stained crystal paperweight, designed 1928, post-1945 paper Label ‘Lalique’ - Also Inscribed ‘Lalique® France’ press-Moulded Lead Crystal

Height: 17,5cm; Width: 10cm; Depth: 7,5cm R 8 000 - 10 000 VIEW LOT

230 Margaret Richardson Germany-South Africa 1908-1989 Quartz and jade neckpiece entered in the trapezium shaped hollow form, a tube-set oval cabochon-cut rutile quartz, surrounded by a 9k yellow gold border, connected either side by terminals tube-set with rectangular jade slices, suspended on a tubogas chain, sterling silver Length Approximately 57cm, Total Weight 75.00 Grams

R 4 000 - 5 000 VIEW LOT

248 Erich Frey Germany - South Africa 1917-2004 Red jasper ring and earring suite the ring, an adhesive-set rectangular red jasper slither, suspended between an inverted arch, on a broad flat band, sterling silver, size N, total weight 11.70 grams; the earring: two adhesive-set rectangular red jasper slithers, suspended below rectangular plates, clip-on findings, sterling silver

Length Approximately 5cm, Total Weight 20.00 Grams R 4 000 - 6 000 VIEW LOT

280 Johan Hagen Denmark A set of Danish modern ‘Unique’ pattern stainless steel flatware designed by Johan Hagen, 20th century comprising: ten dinner knives, ten dinner forks, ten dinner spoons, five butter spreaders, ten cake forks, ten teaspoons, sixteen coffee spoons, five serving spoons, two salad servers and a serving fork and spoon

Longest: 27,5cm R 6 000 - 8 000 VIEW LOT

253 Bertel Gardberg - Hackman & Co Sorsakoski, Finland A set of ‘Lion de Luxe’ set of Rosewood and stainless steel flatware designed by Bertel Gardberg, Finland each stamped Hackman-Finland 18/8, comprising: eight dinner knives, eight dinner forks, eight dinner spoons, eight dessert knives, eight dessert forks, eight dessert spoons, eight teaspoons, twelve coffee spoons, a pair of salad servers, two serving spoons, two sauce ladles and two cake knives c.1950-1960

Longest: 26,5cm R 8 000 - 10 000 *This lot is not suitable for export.

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262 Kalahari Studio South African 1948-1973 Plate with abstracted leaf motif signed ‘kalahari’ and impressed studio mark on the underside terracotta with overglaze decoration c.1950-1970

Diameter: 29cm R 3 000 - 4 000 VIEW LOT

218 Otto Poulsen Jewellers Durban, South Africa amethyst and diamond pendant centered in the mid-century modern design consisting of boomerang shapes and geometric lines, a tube-set cabochon-cut amethyst weighing ap proximately 17.10 ct, with accents of three claw-set round brilliant-cut diamonds weighing approximately 0.21 ct, an s-shaped bail, stamped ‘Otto Poulsen’ Length Approximately3cm, Total Weight 10.30 Grams

R 18 000 - 30 000 VIEW LOT

MID-CENTURY MODERN STYLING: FURNITURE & INTERIORS 18 August - 16 September 2026 Timed Online Auction

358 Herringbone South African Grey and orange vintage Berber rug, Morocco wool

Length: 302cm; width: 200cm R 40 000 - 45 000 *Images courtesy of Herringbone.

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349 ‘B35” style wicker and chrome armchair the woven wicker seat and back within a continuous cantilever frame, shaped timber armrests c.1960

Height: 82cm; Width: 63,5cm; Depth: 81cm R 6 500 - 8 500

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367 Murano Venice, Italy Glass and brass chandelier in the manner of Venini fitted with graduated clear ribbed glass tronchi prisms arranged in cascading multi-tiered formation, suspended from a metal frame c.1960-1970

Diameter: 50cm R18 000 - 20 000 VIEW LOT

370 Jean-Marie Massaud French 1966Pair of lime green ‘Aston’ executive chairs and coffee table for Arper each with upholstered high-back shell with integrated armrests, raised on four-star aluminium swivel base; the matching coffee table with square white composite top raised on aluminium four-star base 2006

Chair Height: 107cm; Width: 72cm; Depth: 80cm, Table Height: 37cm; Width: 61cm; Depth: 61cm R 18 000 - 22 000

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312 Arne Jacobsen Denmark 1902-1971 Set of six ‘Model 3101’ dining chairs for Fritz Hansen the fully upholstered shell, raised on four tubular steel legs embossed ‘Fritz Hansen’ and ‘Made in Denmark’ to the underside c.1960

Height: 79cm; Width: 51cm; Depth: 52cm R 12 000 - 14 000 VIEW LOT

MID-CENTURY MODERN LIVE: FURNITURE, DESIGN & JEWELLERY 16 September 2026 Live Virtual Auction

401 Grete Juel Jalk Denmark 1920-2006 ’Model 128’ teak lounge chair for France & Søn original maker’s mark present c.1960

Height: 77cm; Width: 80cm; Depth: 74cm R 42 000 - 48 000 VIEW LOT

406

Henry Walter Klein Norway 1919-1991 Rosewood sideboard for Bramin, Denmark the rectangular top above four central drawers with recessed drawer pulls, flanked by sliding cupboard doors enclosing a single adjustable shelf, raised on turned tapering legs c.1960

Height: 81cm; Width: 225cm; Depth: 45cm R 60 000 - 80 000 VIEW LOT

408 Mark Brazier-Jones United Kingdom 1956Pair of aluminium ‘Son of Atlantis’ armchairs attributed to Mark Brazier-Jones unmarked c.1980-1990

Height: 70cm; Width: 69,5cm; Depth: 83cm R 50 000 - 60 000 VIEW LOT

421 Alphonse Mucha Czeck Republic 1860-1939 Art Nouveau-style four-panel painted screen each panel depicts female figures within a carved wooden frame with pierced cresting, raised on cabriole legs, signed ‘Mucha’ painted ‘Mucha’ on each panel c.1890-1910

Height: 162cm; Panel Width: 60,5cm; Total Width: 242cm R 80 000 - 100 000

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441 René Lalique French 1860-1945 René Lalique ‘Poissons’ frosted, opalescent and blue-patinated glass vase, No. 925, designed 1921 intaglio moulded ‘R. LALIQUE’ mould-blown glass

Height: 24cm; diameter: 26,5cm

R 120 000 - 130 000

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477 Niels Koefoed Hornslet Denmark 1962Set of eight ‘Eva’ dining chairs for Koefoeds Hornslet, Denmark comprising six side chairs and two carvers, each with a shaped crest rail above a tall backrest with three vertical slats, upholstered seat, raised on tapering ring-turned legs joined by side stretchers impressed manufacturer’s mark to the underside of seat rail ‘MADE IN DENMARK BY KOEFOED’ 1964

Armchair Height: 97cm; Width: 54cm; Depth: 51,5cm; Chair Height: 96cm; Width: 47cm; Depth: 51,5cm R 50 000 - 60 000 *This lot is not suitable for export

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458 Johan Rohde - Georg Jensen Copenhagen, Denmark A set of Georg Jensen silver ‘Acanthus’ pattern flatware designed in 1917 by Johan Rohde, .925 sterling, c.1945-1977 comprising: ten soup spoons, six butter knives, eight fish knives, eight fish forks, ten dinner knives, ten dinner forks, ten dinner spoons, ten dessert knives, ten dessert forks, eight tea spoons, eight cake forks and two serving spoons, 3065g all in c.1945-1977

Longest: 22cm R 120 000 - 160 000

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437 Sergi & Oscar Devesa Spain Pair of ‘Zen’ table lamps for Metalarte manufacturer’s label to the underside 1984

Height: 17cm; Width: 10cm; Depth: 10cm R 30 000 - 35 000 *Strauss & Co does not guarantee electrical fittings.

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474 Georg Jensen Denmark 1866-1935 Georg Jensen silver ring, model 163, Henning Koppel an open ring, each side with flared end, sterling silver, size N, total weight 23.7 grams c.1970s

R 3 000 - 5 000

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482 Philippe Starck France Pair of ‘Romeo Moon’ table lamps for Flos, Italy each with a clear glass ribbed shade enclosing an internal diffuser, raised on a steel stem issuing from a circular aluminium base, fitted with an electronic dimmers factory sticker to inside of shade ‘FLOS SERIE ROMEO MOON’ 1998

Height: 74cm; Diameter: 50cm R 10 000 - 12 000

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434 Mauser-Werke Waldeck, Germany Four-piece ‘Rundform’ executive office suite comprising a Kolm/S executive desk, a Tanger/S occasional table, an Athen/Olimpio credenza, and Tanger Piccolo wastepaper bin original metal manufacturer’s plaque inscribed ‘ MAUSER-WERKE G.m.b.H, Waldeck, Bez. Kassel’, with the Mauser logo c.1950

Sideboard Height: 106,5cm; Width: 267,5; Depth: 41cm; Desk Height: 77cm; Width: 152cm; Depth: 86cm; Round Cabinet Height: 72cm; Diameter: 80cm; Round Bin: Height: 41cm; Diameter: 32cm; Ashtray: Height: 3cm; Diameter: 18,5cm R 60 000 - 80 000 *Disassembles into 10 pieces

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418 Art Deco walnut sideboard the rectangular stepped top above a central section with sliding glass doors above two drawers, flanked by cupboards enclosing a single shelf, raised on block feet joined by a stretcher c.1930

Height: 100cm; Width:160cm; Depth: 55cm R 10 000 - 12 000

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